Web Analytics is Dead!

Web Analytics is the one thing that all web marketers do and it continues to be the least understood. Every corporate site uses some form of Web Analytics software. Whether it's Google Analytics, WebTrends, WebSideStory, or some other package, companies spend thousands of dollars a year on these applications. The problem is that these packages record too much information with too little time to respond. When we do respond, it's to make small changes designed to appeal to the masses that have already been to your site and that if we've even interpretted the data correctly.

If we've learned anything in the ClueTrain era it's that mass anything no longer works. Just look at mass advertising, mass email, and mass mailings. These marketing techniques require that you hit as many people as you can because you're only going to reach about 3% to 5% of them. Well what about the other 95%. Shouldn't we at least try to appeal to them? Well we can.

To appeal to the other 95% on the web, we need to be able to customize and target our content directly to them. We need to learn about our visitors as they use our sites and we need to respond to their needs in real-time, not weeks and months later when we have time to analyze our reports. We don't have the time. Many people will only visit our sites once to decide if they want to do business with us. These lost opportunities will never come back.

We're now well into the Web 2.0 era but our web analytics software has done little to catch up. It's now time to look for ways to communicate as close to a 1 on 1 basis as possible. I've been formulating these ideas for some time now and have begun integrating them in the Marketing for Mavens web application. It focuses on communicating with each of your visitors and I welcome you to try the free beta and let us know what you think.

Treat Your Web Visitors with Respect. Stop Herding Cattle.

We've moved. Please visit www.marketingformavens.com/blog.

One of the features of Marketing for Mavens is the ability to see how each visitor comes to your site and where they go. The real value is that it forces you to see your visitors as individuals instead of a crowd of people.

When you look at your typical web report, you see how all of your visitors interact with your site. You know that a majority of people visit your home page and that a certain percentage go to your product pages but you miss out on the details like how did this person get here, what were they looking for, and did they find it. The other problem is that any changes you make to your site based on these reports is designed to appeal to the masses. Web reports force us to treat our visitors as cattle that we can herd around. We try to find the path of least resistance that we can push them towards and then track the results through funnel analysis knowing that a certain number will drop out but if we can convert 10% to leads we'll be very happy.

This leads us to the niche that Marketing for Mavens fills. There's a very good reason to use all those web reports and you should continue to do so but you should also be looking at your individual visitors as well. Marketing for Mavens will assist you in treating each visitor, or as we like to call them citizen, with respect and open up a new way of communication that will transform how you interact with your potential customers. With this approach, you will understand what your citizens needs are and assist them in fulfilling these needs turning your citizens into customers more quickly and more efficiently then pushing them through a path that you already know loses 90% of your potential leads.

Where is the integration between content management and web analytics applications?

We've moved. Please visit us at www.marketingformavens.com/blog.

One of the problems which Marketing for Mavens tries to solve is that most sites use some kind of content management system and a separate web analytics application and neither of them talk to one another.

Every day your content management system pushes out the same content to the same people and it doesn't know whether that person has visited your site in the past or what they were looking for. Instead, web marketers are left looking at reports on a monthly basis and then trying to configure the site content accordingly. This response is far too slow and you're reacting to the masses and not individual visitors.

Marketing for Mavens helps to solve this problem by tagging you're visitors based on the web pages they view. It then knows each visitors interests and can push the appropriate promotions and content to them in real time based on these interests. Now your site can be personalized to your visitors without them having to register for your site. This is important as you can now target your content and messages to only the visitors interested in seeing it. If you are interested in seeing how Marketing for Mavens can help you to manage your web content and promotions and deliver them to targeted visitors, please check our our short demo video and join or beta program.

Web Site Visitors: Tag and Learn

One of the side benefits of using Marketing for Mavens is learning what topics (tags) your visitors are interested in and how they relate to other topics. For example, you can tag all of your web pages with keywords associated with your content, as each visitor navigates your site, a list of tags become associated with them. Through this relationship you begin get a different level of insight into how your individual pages relate to one another. Unfortunately, right now, most of this analysis must be done by hand. I'm trying to come up with a better way to show this relationship in a report which would remove a lot of complexity. Either way it give a unique view into your visitors and your site that I believe you'll find valuable.

Beta Coming in June

I've decided to push the beta release of Marketing for Mavens to June. The application is coming along nicely and could be ready at the end of May but I feel that taking a couple of extra weeks to add some additional features is going to be well worth the delay.

I've been using the application for the past month on some my personal sites and I'm quite impressed by how well it's working. One feature I've been testing is the ability to push the same content across multiple web sites. Using Marketing for Mavens, I can create a promotion that shows up on Blogger, MarketingforMavens.com, and almost any other site where some JavaScript code can be added to the bottom of a web page. This opens up all kinds of possibilities for content distribution using one simple tool.

As the weeks progress, I'll continue to fill you in on the latest new features and update you on the progress being made. It's very excited for me to see everything coming together and I look forward to sharing this application with you soon.

Custom Web Content Distribution: Demo Now Available

After some delay, I've posted the demo to our web site. The demo takes you through the "getting started" process showing what it takes to open an account, setup page tracking, build tags, and analyze visitors to distribute custom web content. The full demo takes about 10 minutes. If you have any questions, please post your comments here or email me at chris@marketingformavens.com.

View the demo.

Our Target Audience: Marketing Mavens

Often I'm asked who Marketing for Mavens' target audience is. Although there are many people in any size company that can benefit from this application, it is the marketing mavens, the people who thirsts for information and have a strong desire to use this information to connect with people, who have inspired us to build this product.

Most people use web analytics software to tell them what is going on with their site and a separate content management system or file system to deliver the content. What this application does is bridge the gap between these two systems. Marketing for Mavens only collects the information you need to make decisions on customizing content for your visitors. In turn, you use this information to create custom content and promotions and deliver it to each individual based on their past behavior on your web site. This ensure that the right content and promotions get the people who are most interested. Our focus is on providing an application that help you to deliver better results and a higher level of user satisfaction on your web site.

Coming Soon: Video Tutorial on Combing Web Analytics with Web Content Management

One of my goals for the next week or so is to put together a walk-through tutorial. This will show you how to setup a new account, develop custom content, and install a couple of lines of code to get everything up and running.

I also need to update the web site. The current site doesn't do justice for what this application is all about which is, taking advantage of the information you receive from how people interact with your web site and delivering custom content to them as they need it. For now, feel free to submit your email so you can be notified when important updates arrive including information on the limited beta going live in May.

Marketing for Mavens - Now running on our hosting server

Just a quick update to let you know that I have the application up and running at our hosting service. I'll be integrating it into marketingformavens.com so you can begin to see how it works from a "citizen" perspective. This should be ready in a few days. I'll keep you posted.

Quick Update: Setting up Ruby on Rails

The plan for this evening is to have Ruby on Rails up and running so I can migrate everything from the local test environment over to the hosting company. If all goes well, the plan is to have Marketing for Mavens up and running in the wild next week. I'm really looking forward to fully testing this application in an environment where I can start to collect some real data.

There are still some issues that need to be addressed and some features to be added before the beta is launched. The some of these features are:

• Reporting: We're going to be collecting a lot of data which you'll find valuable to share with your colleagues. Of course, none of this is of any use to you unless there is some way to get it out of the database.
• Additional Tracking: There is almost an endless amount of information that we could track and store but you have other web analytics tools for this. We want to make sure we're only providing you with the data that you need to make quick business decisions and that we can use to distribute your content.
• Recording non-HTML Links: Right now, tracking is only occurring on page load. We need to add the ability to record clicks on PDF's, ZIP's, etc. These are very important assets that need to be tracked since you can gain more information about a person's needs based on data sheet download then you can from most web pages.
  

Development Ahead of Schedule

I'm very happy with how things have been coming together with the coding for Marketing for Mavens. I may even be a little ahead of my personal schedule but we'll see if that keeps up. Soon it will be moved out of the testing environment and I'll have it up and running on a site so you can get a "citizen" view of how the application works. I'm really looking forward to getting to this milestone as will give me a better perspective on how things are progressing.

Content Management Meets Web Analytics

Right now, our home page doesn't go into a lot of detail on the features provided by Marketing for Mavens, so I'd like to explain it in more detail. You can imagine Marketing for Mavens as the link between serving content and analyzing web traffic. Most companies do both but they tend to be used in a linear fashion and neither integrates well enough to make business decisions on-the-fly. Your typical setup looks something like this:

Content Management -> Web Site -> Web Analytics -> Analyze Data -> Make Content Changes

What Marketing for Mavens does is store promotions/content that you setup and track web analytics information. Then, based on how a person interacts with your web site, it distributes the most appropriate content or promotion to them. It looks more like this:

Marketing for Mavens <-> Web Site

As a person reads through your web content, we're learning more about this person and what they want. The close interaction between your web site and Marketing for Mavens ensures that you don't need to take the time to analyze the data before you can respond to the needs of your citizens (citizens = visitors; I prefer to use citizens as it gives a much better level of respect to the people who take the time to come to your site). Best of all, this is customized to each person meaning you no longer need to try to be all things to all people.

Some of the key features:

• Customize messages/promotions based on your site's visitor history.
• Analyze individual citizens so you can determine who is most interested in your products and services.
• Tag and assign points to your web site URL's to determine areas of interested and the level of interest.